Jack Coons

From redefinED co-host Doug Tuthill: Milton Friedman and Jack Coons were intellectual giants in their respective disciplines (Friedman in economics and Coons in law) and strong school choice advocates. But their rationales differed and this led to many interesting – and often contentious – debates. Despite their differences, their debates were always courteous and civil. So when Dr. Friedman died in 2006, his foundation asked Jack to write a chapter in a book honoring Dr. Friedman’s memory, and he agreed. Today is Dr. Friedman’s 100th birthday, so we again asked Jack to share some thoughts on Dr. Friedman, and again he agreed.

Milton Friedman was an economic libertarian of singular intellectual purity. I am less pure, and to me Friedman’s way of modeling the ideal educational triangle of parent, school and child has seemed a simplification limiting our perception of the social implications and, thus, of the politics of choice. I have said all this before. Why, then, do I gladly join this chorus of praise for what I have criticized?

It is not from mere personal fondness for the man. It is, rather, because it was Friedman’s specific application of free market dogma to schools at a particular historical moment that made it possible for a vigorous critique of the American model even to begin. His cry in the night may not have been the first; nor was it the sufficient cause of the great awakening—but it was probably necessary.

Our national mind had long been frozen in admiration of an arrangement comfortable to the middle class, but incapable of realizing education in a democratic way. There is no version of our historic district model of school assignment, even with charter schools, that can in practice achieve what the Europeans honor under the cumbrous but useful title “subsidiarity.” That word warns us to keep authority over the lives of persons either in their own hands or as close to the individual—and in as small a group—as possible. If bowling were our subject, few of us might prefer bowling alone, but neither would we wish to be directed by government to bowl with the people next door.

Left to themselves, humans cluster freely in diverse ways, most of which are innocent and some even creative; their clumps and hives are generally the better for having been chosen. And, if diversity and the smaller unit can serve the purpose, let us lodge the power there.

Subsidiarity could be realized only in a corrupted way by our old district systems. True, some of us can choose to bundle in Beverly Hills, but…and you know the rest of that story; it is daily thrust in our face by the media, and it is true. Many among us just can’t choose Beverly Hills. So at government command my child must learn whatever ideas happen to get taught and whatever behavior gets encouraged in Berkeley.

It was Milton Friedman who in our time rediscovered and announced that this fate of the have-not child was neither efficient nor necessary. A lot of people heard him. Most who did were at first shocked that this sacred cow of democracy, the public education system, had been labeled as a clumsy, self-defeating, anti-social monopoly. But some did begin to listen. And in spite of the system’s sputtering and posturing, they still do. Friedman’s defamation of the schools has begun to stick.

Editor’s note: This is the first of two post we’re running this week to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the monumental U.S. Supreme Court decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which upheld the constitutionality of the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio and kicked open the doors for expanded school choice nationwide.

Zelman made clear that the federal constitution allows states to give money to parents that they can use for tuition at religious schools. So long as states don’t directly finance the school itself, no foul. Sadly, some states have constitutions with “Blaine Amendments” that do forbid helping parents this way. These are relics of bigotry; hopefully, the federal courts or sheer political shame will one day erase them.

Would a national commitment to parental choice be a good thing? Think about it. First, remember that the choice of a religious school by parents who pay is a long settled constitutional right. It is widely exercised by those who can afford it. Middle class people in fact have considerable control over where their children enroll and what they learn; they can move to a house in their favorite suburb or they can pay private school tuition.

Clearly, our society is committed to the proposition that parental choice is a social good—at least when made by those who can pay for it themselves. The real issue, then, is whether choice is a good for kid, kin, and country when exercised by families of ordinary means and by the poor.

More bluntly—do we or don’t we want inner-city citizens exercising their rights over their own children? Why have we made it so hard for them? And even where we do allow them to choose a bit (as with public charter schools), what do we, as a society, gain or lose by excluding religious private schools as one among many choices?

Long ago Plato gave arguments for having the state seize complete authority over the child at birth from all families—rich and poor. He thought he knew the one true way and simply did not trust any parent to do right. Maybe there are some platonic arguments for various goods that America achieves when it frustrates choice to the extent it does. Is it somehow productive to snatch the child the child from the authority of ordinary parents for the prime hours of the day for 13 years? What magic is worked by government monopoly over the core experience of the child outside the home?

Is it right that we assume that ordinary parents who cannot afford to pay tuition do not deserve that choice, even if they believe the choice would be best for their children? Crime is, to be sure, more common among lower income groups. But is it less common than it would be if the government were to allow choice? What is cause here and what is effect? Do kids (and all of us) really improve by having complete strangers decide what is worth learning? And do these unchosen strangers do a better job at transmitting the ideas that all of us think important?

Next week marks the 10th anniversary of the monumental U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris – the decision that upheld the constitutionality of the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio and accelerated school choice nationwide by describing the conditions under which parents could use public funds to pay tuition and fees at religious schools. To honor the occasion, redefinED will bring you special posts from our partners at the American Center for School Choice.

On Monday, you’ll hear from John E. Coons, a member of the ACSC board of directors and a professor of law, emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. “Do we or don’t we want inner-city citizens exercising their rights over their own children?” he writes. “Why have we made it so hard for them? And even where we do allow them to choose a bit (as with public charter schools), what do we, as a society, gain or lose by excluding religious private schools as one among many choices?”

On Tuesday, ACSC executive director Peter Hanley will weigh in. He takes a closer look at the ongoing court battle over vouchers in Douglas County, Colo., and writes this about some of the legal briefs filed in the case: “Drawing on the historical work of my American Center for School Choice colleagues … the briefs provide a lurid and extensive history of the anti-Catholic bigotry that led to a wave of state constitutional amendments banning funds to support “sectarian” (19th century code for “Catholic”) organizations. They make a compelling case that the trial court not only erred in finding the amendments were violated, but incorrectly ignored this shameful history that means they should be struck down.”

It’s hard to miss Dick Morris. The former presidential aide and Fox News contributor has raised the volume on his rhetoric during the last couple of days to promote National School Choice Week, and Education Sector’s Kevin Carey was right to note that Morris does more harm to his cause when he harangues the interests and performance of public schools so viciously. But in an otherwise enjoyable essay for The Atlantic, Carey misses an opportunity to further explore how the choice movement evolved to become, as he says, so ideologically “ghettoized.” Along the way, he succeeds in guiding us only to familiar territory.

As many do, Carey traces the movement’s roots to Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” but he dispatches the left turn that school choice made in the 1970s as if it was a political afterthought. In reality, the means-tested policies that facilitate public and private school choice today more closely resemble the proposals from the political left and center that surfaced between the Johnson and Reagan administrations than anything that Milton Friedman sought to test. Greater awareness of that history might not transform the debate, but it could help to lift it from isolation.

Lost to history are the rich Chicago radio debates that took place between Milton Friedman and Jack Coons, who was to champion the cause for equity in the financing of public education and emerged as one of the most stalwart liberal advocates for school choice. To Coons, the poor would show us the right way to develop a proper test for parental choice that extended to private and religious schools, under regulated conditions. He and colleague Stephen Sugarman developed their centrist theory and constitutional framework in their 1978 book, Education by Choice, which drew the attention of a Democratic congressman from California, Leo Ryan. Ryan urged Coons to draft an initiative, saying he would raise the money and organize the campaign. This all happened, of course, before Ryan left to investigate reports of human rights abuses at the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, where he was murdered. Coons and Sugarman began the campaign anyway, confident the money would somehow appear. “Both libertarians and teachers unions laid their curse, and the thing died,” Coons would later write.

Around that time, a newly elected Democratic senator named Daniel Patrick Moynihan crafted a measure with Republican Senator Bob Packwood that would have awarded up to $500 in tax credits to families paying private or parochial school tuition. At one point, 24 Democrats and 26 Republicans in the Senate ranging from Sen. George McGovern to Sen. Barry Goldwater signed on as co-sponsors. Moynihan would write that, when the bill was heard, there was a palpable strength felt in the chamber “of the views pressed upon us that this was a measure middle-class Americans felt they had coming to them.” Even soon-to-be elected President Jimmy Carter promised, in a campaign message to Catholic school administrators, that he was “committed to finding constitutionally acceptable methods of providing aid to parents whose children attend parochial schools.” That was before Carter received the first-ever endorsement from the National Education Association. After he took office, the Moynihan-Packwood measure eventually fizzled.

And this flirtation with history cannot forget the forgettable experiment at Alum Rock, California, home to the nation’s first test of school vouchers. Although the experiment took place under the auspices of the Nixon administration, the project began with a team led by the liberal Harvard social scientist Christopher Jencks. “Today’s public school has a captive clientele,” Jencks would write in Kappan. “As a result, it in turn becomes the captive of a political process designed to protect the interests of its clientele.” It was that political process that eventually doomed Alum Rock to a compromise that agreed only to choice within public schools and guaranteed employment for the instructional staff. Just six of the district’s 24 schools volunteered to be the educational guinea pig. The experiment lasted just five years.

This isn’t just a trip down memory lane. What links these initiatives is a call for equity, and that has precedence in today’s targeted voucher and tax credit scholarship laws in Milwaukee, Florida and most other states that have initiated private school options for the poor and disabled, and it has precedence in the positioning of our more innovative educational experiments in the inner city. I wish the organizers for National School Choice Week would do more to point to this Democratic heritage when they highlight the areas where we see growing bipartisan support for choice today, and I wish commentators like Kevin Carey would stop dismissing these points in history as if they had no relevance to our dialogue today. That job might be easier if people like Dick Morris stepped out of the spotlight for a moment.

David Brooks addresses a fictional foreign tourist in today’s New York Times by presenting a guidemap to acceptable and unacceptable American inequality. “Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other,” Brooks writes, and I’m reminded of a passage in Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson’s book, “Saving Schools,” which addressed the fiscal equity movement of the 1970s. Peterson tries to help the reader understand why the equity movement ultimately ran up against entrenched interests, highlighting specifically the challenges redefinED hosts John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman faced when championing the Serrano case in California and the Rodriguez case in Texas. Coons, Sugarman and others had conceived a powerful idea, Peterson writes:

Equal protection before the law implies that all school districts within a state should have the same fiscal capacity. But that idea came up against the basic fact that those with more money want to spend more on their children’s education, just as they want to spend more on housing, transportation, and all the other good things in life. To be told that their child’s school shall have no more resources than any other school in the state runs counter to the desire of virtually all educated, prosperous parents to see their own children given every educational advantage. Fiscal equity was divisive.

The evidence that Coons and Sugarman had unearthed struck at the inequalities in spending between rich districts and poor districts, and it led the pair on a four-decade long mission to champion the cause of school choice. A commitment to family choice in education, Coons would later write, “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” Has the opposition to choice led to another form of acceptable American inequality?

Editor’s note: This entry comes from John E. Coons, who has championed the cause of school choice for four decades and co-founded the American Center for School Choice. He is Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and with colleague Stephen D. Sugarman is the author of Private Wealth and Public Education. He is our newest host of redefinED.

We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good—for the child, the parent, the family, and society.

We begin with the delicate subject of authority—that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.

Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.

The debate on authority dates from Plato’s vision in the The Republic of an ideal state that would completely disempower parents for a utopian common good and continues up to modern times. But in the U.S., the question of who has authority over the child has been universally resolved in all 50 states in favor of parents. In every state the custodial parent, whether natural or adoptive, holds a very wide ranging legal authority over his, her, or their own child. This sovereignty includes every experience of the child that the parent can physically and intellectually control short of neglect and abuse. It encompasses diet, hours, church, pets, exercise, and television as well as the power to decide who else shall have access to the child. This power to control access and environment includes, again, within broadest limits, the satisfaction of the parents’ obligation to school the child and the child’s own right to be schooled.

This authority has been tested in a steady line of Supreme Court cases since 1925. The parent who is legally fit to govern—99% of our parents—in truth has the right to govern. And the point of the law is not that parents make particularly good decisions for the children; individual mothers and fathers may or may not act in what you or I consider the best interest of the child or society. They are not necessarily good deciders; they are merely the best our culture, law, and history have discovered. They also have accountability in ways that are impossible to the world of American professionals, of doctors, lawyers, educators, and so forth. These people see clients for a time, do their best, wish them well, and head on home. The custodial parent is stuck—for better or worse and maybe for life—with what emerges out of whatever effort is made.

This wide acceptance throughout American society and its legal system of deference to and accountability for parental authority forms the foundation for broadening the support for choice in education. Our current system is an aberration of the way the rest of American life functions.

Editor’s note: As redefinED enters its second year of publication, it has joined an alliance with the American Center for School Choice. Its first post comes from Fawn Spady, the Center’s chairwoman, and Stephen D. Sugarman, its vice chairman.

Today the American Center for School Choice begins its exciting partnership with redefinED in a joint effort to focus attention on the importance of empowering parents with the authority to educate their children. The mission of the American Center for School Choice, advocating expansion of public support for families to choose the schools they believe will best serve their children, is rooted in two basic propositions:

The education of the child is a fundamental responsibility of the family

Enabling parents to choose the school that will best help them to fulfill this responsibility will strengthen families, schools, and communities

The American Center supports the work of the many fine organizations advocating for education reform based on expanding the power of consumers in the educational marketplace and the need for greatly improved academic outcomes. The movement has won significant political victories, but also experienced many defeats.

Our organization’s name was intentionally selected because we believe a strong political center and consequently a broad coalition for school choice exists in a focus on parental empowerment. In placing families first, the Center’s perspective creates a unique and powerful opportunity to expand support for school choice to include greater numbers of political centrists, religious leaders, social justice advocates, and ordinary citizens who are either uninformed or uninspired by current educational reform debates.

Ultimately, we need to create and support good schools of all types to serve the diversity of our population’s needs. We want to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities, including inter- and intra-district choice of public schools, choice through public charter schools, and choice of private and religious schools through publicly funded scholarship and tax credit programs. The American Center for School Choice believes that expanding support for families to choose public, private, or religious schools for their children is a civic and moral imperative.

The Center’s primary activity is education. All families, but especially low-income parents and students who have not been well served historically, benefit when they select the school that they believe will best serve their children. The Center has utilized a variety of media and forums to provide information and analyses to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities. In partnering with redefinED, we have found a kindred spirit where great synergy exists.

Our board, associates, and staff will be regularly contributing their thoughts on where we are, where we hope to go next, and how best to get there. In addition to us, you will hear from Jack Coons, Charles Glenn, Gloria Romero, Terry Moe, Darla Romfo, Alan Bonsteel, Rick Garnett, and others in our network. We all look forward to joining and stimulating ongoing thoughtful and respectful exchanges that have marked redefined since its beginning.

Over at Dropout Nation, RiShawn Biddle has explored how school choice activists, particularly those on the left, can re-energize the legal case for equity in education spending. He writes, “If choice activists and civil libertarian groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union successfully take up such moves, it would lead to another round of school choice efforts that would provide more poor and minority children with opportunities to get the high-quality education they deserve.”

Biddle has done more than any journalist to highlight the egregious symptoms of what he calls zip code education, notably pointing to the criminal prosecution of a homeless mother in Connecticut and a low-income parent in Ohio who sent their children to schools outside their assigned districts. He sees relief in the very state constitutional provisions that give most choice advocates heartburn: the idea that states must provide uniform systems of public schools. The language differs depending on the state, but the same barriers exist for voucher or charter school expansions. Or do they?

“Practices that have led to zip code education, including the concept of zoned schools, are essentially unconstitutional; and thus, inter-district choice of the kind encouraged by otherwise foes of choice such as Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation would be allowable,” Biddle writes.

Before readers roll their eyes, they should know there is precedence in Biddle’s contention, namely in two of the most stalwart advocates for equity, John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman of the University of California at Berkeley. Coons and Sugarman first struck at the inequalities in school spending between rich districts and poor districts in the 40-year-old California case known as Serrano v. Priest. The case led the California Supreme Court in 1971 to establish the concept of “fiscal neutrality,” which recognized that the quality of a child’s education should not be a function of a district’s wealth or poverty. The way to equalize education for rich and poor, Coons and Sugarman eventually argued, was to enact a system of choice.

A commitment to family choice in education, Coons would later write, “would maximize, equalize and dignify as no other remedy imaginable.” And, notably, this comes from a progressive voice that Biddle believes is critical to this enterprise. While it’s unlikely that any grassroots or parent-led effort can soon convince the ACLU to drop its opposition to the choice policies that Biddle and Coons would promote, Biddle is right to argue that it will take a left-of-center effort to quarterback this challenge.